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One may dismiss such statements as purely quixotic arguments. However, since there is some attempt at logic in this madness, it is best to pay attention to them in the same manner that a psychiatrist might pay attention to the problems of a patient. Such attention to Sri Lanka's problems would soon reveal the rather pathetic distortion of reality.
Some good examples of such writings are those of the secretary-general of the Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process. It is possible to copy his style of characterizing others and simply be dismissive, saying he is only doing this to justify his job. However, such mean tactics are not worthy of imitation.
The central argument of these spokesmen is that, although there is a need for much improvement in the human rights record of the country, it can only be accomplished through the improvement of national institutions, and moreover, for this improvement to be realized, technical assistance from outside the country is needed. The government spokesmen quickly add, however, that any form of monitoring by outsiders would be counterproductive.
The first question that arises is: Who is preventing the government of Sri Lanka from improving its national institutions on its own? By national institutions, what is meant is the capacity to investigate all allegations of crime, including human rights violations, the capacity to prosecute all such crimes and the capacity to adjudicate on these matters according to the norms and standards of an independent judiciary.
Since the spokesmen for the government admit there is something wrong with these national institutions, it would follow that the government is obligated to eliminate the defects and improve them. Who or what is preventing the government from doing so if it has the desire and the will to take the required actions?
This line of reasoning raises a second question: Where is the need for technical assistance? Technical assistance is meant to improve local capacity. This means that if the Sri Lankan police do not have competent police officers to investigate violations of human rights it is necessary to improve that capacity through the training provided by outside experts.
If the attorney general's office, as the prosecuting authority, does not have the competence to conduct proper prosecutions, then the government must get foreign experts to improve their competence. Similarly, if the Sri Lankan judiciary does not have the competence to do its job, then foreign talent must be introduced to help with improving the local capacity.
If the spokesmen for the Sri Lankan government are saying that the Sri Lankan investigators, prosecutors and judiciary are suffering from the absence of competence, then why do they not say so directly?
They cannot make this claim directly because it would be such a false statement that it would arouse a local and international uproar. So entrenched is their psychotic frame of mind that these spokesmen have to hide the actual problem and try to create a false problem hoping that others will be misguided by that.
Everyone knows that the Sri Lankan justice system does not suffer from a lack of capacity. It suffers from restraints placed on the use of the competence that it abundantly possessed in the past. The Sri Lankan justice system is like a big giant that has been tied so tightly it is not able to manifest its capacity and do the job it is quite capable of doing. The magic rope that ties the giant is the politicization of the whole process in which corrupt politicians have used their powers to subdue the justice system. This problem cannot be cured by merely applying the ointment of technical assistance.
The spokesmen for the government are unable to state to their country and the outside world that there are no human rights violations. Nor are they capable of telling anyone that they do not want to stop these violations because the corrupt political system that exists within the country cannot survive without creating an enormous psychosis of fear through continuously maintaining a state of violence.
Any such honest statements would result in these spokesmen being quickly dismissed from their positions. The role of the spokesmen for a corrupt system is to create some sort of camouflage to make things appear nice even when the actual political agenda for which they stand is nasty and brutish.
Despite volumes of paper produced by these spokesmen, the central issue they do not address -- and cannot be expected to address -- is how the national capacity of the justice system can be improved when the government, in fact, wants to cripple that very system.
The implementation of the 17th Amendment to the Constitution, for example, plainly illustrates this point. When the 17th Amendment was adopted almost unanimously in Parliament in 2001, there was a consensus that the basic national institutions had collapsed and that some measures must be taken to revive them. It was a limited measure, but could have been the beginning of the end of the process of undermining Sri Lanka's national institutions.
However, even this limited attempt has been sabotaged by the government. The people who have been nominated for appointment to the Constitutional Council are quite competent local members of society. They do not need any technical assistance from outside the country to do their job. However, they have been hindered by a political scheme that does not want the operation of a legal scheme in which the appointments, promotions, transfers and disciplinary control of different institutions of the state are in the hands of independent-minded figures. As meritocracy and corruption cannot coexist, the realization of the 17th Amendment has been deliberately weakened.
Such psychotic stories of falsification will continue as long as there is a political determination not to permit corruption to be undermined. The task of these spokesmen is to be defenders of bandit capitalism, a process that has also created bandit democracy.
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(Basil Fernando is director of the Asian Human Rights Commission based in Hong Kong. He is a Sri Lankan lawyer who has also been a senior U.N. human rights officer in Cambodia. He has published several books and written extensively on human rights issues in Asia.)
